1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to telecommunications systems and, particularly, to e-mail alias registration.
2. Description of the Related Art
Unsolicited e-mail or “spam” is a problem of increasing scope. Often, spammers (those who generate such unsolicited e-mail) obtain users' e-mail addresses using mail bots that troll for e-mail addresses in chat rooms, bulletin boards and news groups.
Users of chat rooms, bulletin boards and news groups can decrease the likelihood of receiving spam by not posting or by posting under a nonexistent address, such that if someone sends spam to the address, it won't go anywhere. Such precautions, however, prevent users from being able to use the Internet to its fullest extent.
Alternatively, various methods for blocking or filtering spam e-mail are known. For example, sophisticated users can block their SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol) port to reject e-mail received from a particular site or within a particular range of IP addresses. However, the ordinary user is typically not capable of configuring his system in such a manner. A number of other filtering methods, either by Mail Transfer Agents (MTA) or Mail User Agents (MUA) are known, but again, may require relatively sophisticated configuration procedures. Moreover, spammers are increasingly using third party relaying such that the spam appears to be received from an innocent site. In such cases, further measures must be taken.
Anonymous servers are known, whereby a user may be assigned an e-mail alias and a password. To send e-mail, the user must enter the password as part of the message and direct it to the server (as well as the “true” destination. The anonymous server then strips off identification information and directs the e-mail appropriately. Reply e-mails sent to the e-mail alias are directed to the user's “true” e-mail address. Such servers may be moderated such that the server provider will manually attempt to filter spam. However, manual filtering is not necessarily effective and can be prohibitively time consuming.